Oscar Nominations: Snubs. Snubs… EVERYWHERE. (Full List!)

Oscar Nominations: Snubs. Snubs… EVERYWHERE. (Full List!)

Is anyone else a little baffled by all the snubs made in the Academy Award nominations this year? Full list here!

-Lucia Peters

While we were all wrapped up in our red carpet coverage for the People’s Choice Awards yesterday, a few very important announcements were made—those announcements being the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards. And while there were a lot of things that weren’t exactly surprises (with twelve nods, Lincoln topped the list, though to be honest, all the acclaim baffles me—to be fair, I haven’t seen it yet, but all of the entertainment and showbiz professionals I know all said they were bored by it), there WERE some really bizarre upsets. Why so many snubs, Academy of Arts and Sciences?

The biggest upsets are arguable in the Best Director category, where neither Ben Affleck nor Kathryn Bigelow secured a nomination. This is WEIRD. To be fair, I suppose I can understand why Ben may not have garnered one; although both Gone, Baby, Gone and The Town were well-received, Argo is really his first Important-with-a-capital-I film. Since that effectively makes him a newbie… well, you do the math. Kathryn Bigelow, however, has made her career making Important-with-a-capital-I films, and she does so with remarkable skill and intelligence—qualities that are all the more necessary because of the difficult subject matter she chooses to direct and therefore illuminate. So why the Zero Dark Thirty directing snub?

Tom Hooper, too, failed to earn a Best Director nomination, and while I’ve actually been hearing sort of mixed things about Les Mis, he still deserved a little bit of recognition for the gamble he took making (that is, having the actors sing live while shooting instead of prerecording the soundtrack months in advance). I also kind of wish Quentin Tarantino had been nominated for Django Unchained, but that might just be because I’m a longtime Tarantino fan (I enjoyed Django, and I think it was well done, but I also don’t think it’s his best film to date).

In other categories, Helen Mirren (Hitchcock), John Hawkes (The Session), and Marion Cotillard (Rust and Bone) missed out on acting nods—in spite of the fact that all of them seemed like shoe-ins at least for nominations, if not awards. Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom was sadly absent from the Best Picture category (though it did earn a nod for Best Original Screenplay); likewise for The Intouchables and Rust and Bone in the Best Foreign Language Film category. I can’t be the only one who was surprised by all of these glaring omissions, can I, Bettys?

Of course, there are also a number of unexpected nominations that gladden my little film-loving heart. The Best Animated Feature category was dominated not by computer animation, as is so often the case these days, but by stop-motion animation. I cannot TELL you how happy that makes me. But even better is the fact that all of the films in the Best Animated Feature category are wonderful, so no matter who wins, EVERYONE wins in the long run (I’m still pulling for ParaNorman, though. Seriously—go see it if you haven’t already).

The big and pleasant surprise, though is of course, is the Best Leading Actress nomination that Quvenzhane Wallis received for Beasts of the Southern Wild. Why? Because at nine years old, she’s the youngest actress ever to earn the nomination. Wowzers. Of course, the question after awards season is over will be whether she can (or even wants to) pursue her full potential in the long term. Nominees that young often (sadly) don’t—just look at Keisha Castle-Hughes and Haley Joel Osment. If we’re lucky, though, she’ll be more like Saoirse Ronan or Abigail Breslin instead.